INTRODUCTION
Shiba Inu is an Ethereum-based altcoin. It features a Japanese breed of hunting dog called the Shiba Inu as its symbol. Shiba Inu is often touted as ‘the Dogecoin killer’, an alternative to the coin. Shiba Inu is a memecoin. Meme coins are cryptos inspired by some jokes or memes on the internet. For eg: a viral photo of a Shiba Inu dog inspired the crypto Shiba Inu.
Meme coins frequently have billions of units in circulation, in contrast to Bitcoin, which was designed to have a finite number of units available to mine. Meme coins also lack a mechanism that “burns(Opens in a new window)” coins or permanently eliminates them from circulation, thus the quantity of coins continually keeps growing. Generally, meme coins do not have any utility but this is not true for Shiba Inu.
Shiba Inu gained popularity in 2021 and its price jumped more than ten-fold in October 2021. Shiba Inu is a token, not a coin. The coins have their blockchains while the tokens are the ones that are created on top of existing blockchains. Shiba Inu does not have its blockchain, it is built on the Ethereum blockchain.
Ryoshi (creator of Shiba Inu) chose Ethereum because it was secure and well-established. Because Shiba Inu is built on Ethereum, it supports smart contracts, users can lend or stake them and earn passive income. Also, the Shiba Inu is a multi-token ecosystem consisting of three tokens: Shiba Inu (SHIB), Leash (LEASH), and bone (BONE).
EMERGENCE OF SHIBA INU (SHIB)
The Shiba Inu was created in August 2020 by a pseudonymous individual or a group named Ryoshi. Much like Satoshi Nakamoto (creator of Bitcoin), the real identity of Ryoshi is unknown. It was launched as the rival of Dogecoin.
The official website of the Shiba Inu listed SHIB as the Dogecoin killer for a long time. The price of the Shiba Inu coin skyrocketed in 2021. Shiba Inu has become popular for two primary reasons:
- Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, tweeted that he was interested in owning a Shiba pup as a pet, this tweet hyped the crypto market and led to an increase in the price of Shiba Inu by around three times.
My Shiba Inu will be named Floki
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2021
- Shiba Inu Price fell almost 40% after Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, donated 50 trillion Shiba Inu coins to the India Covid Relief Fund. The Shiba that Vitalik donated was sent to him by the creator of Shiba Inu himself. Vitalik also removed 90% of the remaining supply of Shiba Inu from circulation by sending it over to an inaccessible wallet.
SHIBA INU WHITEPAPER SUMMARY – ARCHITECTURE
Shiba INU whitepaper talks about mainly the following three tokens make up the Shiba Inu ecosystem: Shiba Inu (SHIB)- SHIB coin is the center of the Shiba Inu ecosystem that powers the whole ecosystem, it is an ERC-20 token (i.e. it was created on the Ethereum platform). At launch, a set amount of 1 quadrillion coins were minted.
This is the ecosystem’s primary utility token. It primarily offers two utilities –
- It is obtained as a reward for providing liquidity support to the ecosystem.
- It can be used to pay fees on any Ethereum transaction. It can also be traded or used as a medium of exchange.
Leash (LEASH)
The LEASH token is the most scarce of the Shiba Inu-related tokens, with a maximum cap of 107,646 units. Holders of LEASH can stake the token and utilize it to provide liquidity for the LEASH-ETH pair in exchange for BONE tokens as staking incentives.
Bone (BONE)
Third in the ecosystem is BONE, which has a fixed supply of 250 million tokens. BONE serves as the network’s governance token, providing voting privileges on upcoming proposals on the Doggy DAO, which is scheduled to launch in 2022. BONE will be awarded for staking and supporting liquidity on ShibaSwap. Additionally, BONE can be used to offer liquidity for the BONE-ETH trading pair and staked for additional BONE token incentives, rewarding liquidity providers with 0.1 percent of every DAI and USDT swap return.
The Shiba Inu ecosystem has additional components in addition to the three tokens mentioned above, such as:
ShibaSwap (DEX)
The Shiba Inu team founded ShibaSwap, a decentralised exchange. ShibaSwap secured $1 billion in liquidity less than 24 hours after it was founded. SHIB is the most important of its three significant tokens. Leash and Bone are the other two, respectively. It currently provides a tool called Dig to assist its investors in staking their tokens and gaining liquidity. Depending on how many tokens have been staked on ShibaSwap, the pools then divide the incentives equally.
The team at @Ryoshis_Vision
has released a community update, in their twitter account, and in regards to the SHIB Burn Portal.Please follow their social channel for an upcoming and more detailed response to current efforts.
Thank you for your support at this time. https://t.co/7zkfRFMOM7
— ShibaSwapDEX (@ShibaSwapDEX) July 24, 2022
Shiba Inu Incubator
The Shiba Inu Incubator is a program devoted to identifying other use cases for recognising and rewarding creativity that goes beyond photography, painting, and computer rendering.
Shiboshi
There are 10,000 Shiba Inu-generated NFTs, accessible on the Ethereum blockchain. Holders of Shiboshi will be able to use their NFTs in strategic gameplay through the Shiboshi Game, which is yet to be launched.
ADVANTAGES OF SHIBA INU
- Rewards – Staking or participation in a liquidity pool are two ways that investors can earn rewards. Staking is the ability to validate transactions and receive rewards while keeping your crypto locked up in a wallet or on an exchange.
- Smart contracts: Unlike Dogecoin (its biggest competitor), SHIB may be used with smart contracts. This is a result of Shiba Inu’s foundation being the Ethereum network.
- Exchange medium – Because of its higher liquidity, it is simple to utilize as a medium of exchange.
DISADVANTAGES OF SHIBA INU
- Meme Coin – It is a meme coin. In other words, it began as a joke or an experiment. However, traders from all over the world have now been interested in it. Shiba Inu now has a DEX of its own and plans to create its metaverse, indicating a change in identity.
- No independent Blockchain – The Shiba Inu ecosystem is not a separate blockchain, which raises the possibility that something might happen to Ethereum, even though this is improbable. So, the investor also has to keep up with the news on the Ethereum network.
SHIBA INU’S TOKENOMICS
Shiba Inu Whitepaper described it’s creator as an unknown creator known only as “Ryoshi,” and has gained 14498918.54% since it first appeared on the crypto market. At the time of writing, SHIBA INU coin price is trading for $0.00001183 which is around 86% down from its All time high of $0.00008845. It has a live market cap of $6,486,503,760 USD, and ranks #15 on CoinMarketCap.
Initially, SHIB was minted with a total supply of 1 quadrillion tokens. Even while there is a limited supply, it is still far too big to cause deflation. The total number of SHIB in circulation as of 2022 is over 425 trillion. SHIB is locked on Uniswap for 50% of its total available supply.
The remaining 50% tokens were transferred to “Vitalik Buterin’s” wallet (the co-creator of Ethereum). Expecting he would burn them completely. This decision drew criticism in the crypto community: Why send such a significant sum to such a wealthy individual and what would he do with it?
By giving the India Covid Relief Fund 500 Ethereum coins and over 50 trillion SHIB, Buterin appeased the community. He still held 45% of the whole SHIB supply, raising questions about the decentralisation of SHIB’s operations and its vulnerability to future volatility.
Later, Buterin executed a record-breaking burn of 410.24 trillion SHIB, or around $6.6 billion, or 40% of the total supply, which was permanently withdrawn from circulation after receiving strong criticism. About 41% of the SHIB tokens are burned, which means they are no longer in circulation, including the vast amount sent to Buterin.
Ethereum co-founder @VitalikButerin has burned 90% of his Shiba Inu coin (SHIB) holdings, an amount worth $6.7 billion. The rest will go to charity, he said.
Via @JamieCrawleyCD https://t.co/tdlItTaRrC
— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk) May 17, 2021
SHIBA INU Coin Price Performance over the Years
SHIB/USDT | Source: Tradingview
Additional Read: Shiba Inu Price Prediction
SHIBA INU COMPETITORS IN THE CRYPTO SPACE
The main competitor of Shiba Inu is Dogecoin. The founder of the Shiba also embraces the ‘Dogecoin Killer’ label. Dogecoin has its blockchain and is made through a similar proof-of-work mining system as Bitcoin.
Whereas, the Shiba Inu coin is an Ethereum-based token with a proof-of-stake mining system. Currently, Shiba Inu stands 15th and Dogecoin stands 10th according to their market capitalisation. In 2021, Shiba did outperform Dogecoin. Both these coins are based on the same dog meme.
There are several other meme coins also which imitate the same concept to ride along this frenzy of meme coins. Some of them are:
- DogeCase(DOGEC): Launched in October 2018 and focuses on charitable contributions and ranks 1871 according to its market capitalisation.
- DogeSwap (DOGES): The issuers of DogeSwap were inspired by DogeCoin to make decentralised finance (DeFi) more efficient and give high returns for yield farming. DogeSwap ranks 2296 according to its market capitalisation.
Additional Read: SHIBA vs DOGE
SHIBA INU WHITEPAPER SUMMARY: ROADMAP & VISION
Shiba gained public attention during the 2021 bull market. IIts developers are now thinking of several initiatives to bring utility to Shiba and make it a legitimate project rather than a simple meme token. The progress is being made slowly. In November 2021, The SHIBOSHIS was launched.
The SHIBOSHIS is a collection of cute NFT avatars. Also, in April 2022, The team of Shiba Inu conducted a sale of around a hundred thousand virtual land plots for an upcoming Metaverse project Shiba Inu. SHIB: The Metaverse will be developed in partnership with a leading game studio. The Shiba team also has other plans for the ecosystem. They are developing the Layer 2 Shibarium network.
The new network will be Ethereum-compatible and it is being created by a blockchain development company called Unification. The new network is supposed to form the base layers of the Shiba Inu ecosystem. The network is supposed to be optimized for gaming and has higher throughput and lower cost than Ethereum.
The Shiba Inu fans are also excited about the play-to-earn game which was announced in November 2021 and its development is being led by William Volk, a gaming industry veteran who has more than 2 decades of experience at companies like Activision and ROKiT Games. So, the Shiba Inu is trying to do away with its meme coin status and establish itself as a serious crypto contender. The future of Shiba does look bright and it may go up in the rank of its market cap if everything goes according to plan.
Additional Read: How to buy SHIBA LAND
CONCLUSION
Shiba Inu’s future is uncertain. While it has defied all expectations by becoming popular, it is yet to provide a practical use-case scenario. The coin’s reliance on hype as a price driver is troubling. However, it is worth noting that SHIB can be used with smart contracts and that the ecosystem includes a DEX as stated in SHIBA INU whitepaper.
This means that the token and ecosystem can perform nearly all of the functions of the Ethereum network. As a result, there is always the possibility that the ecosystem will receive a “Killer app” that people will enjoy. Just because it started as a meme coin, it does not mean it doesn’t have the potential to find a real use case. SHIB has a long list of futuristic plans like creating an interactive metaverse, a Play-to-Earn game, etc. which might further help it to shed its meme coin status.
HOW TO INVEST IN SHIBA INU (SHIB)
Use this three-step process to buy your first SHIB token using the CoinDCX, crypto investment app.
- Sign Up for the CoinDCX account: Enter a valid email address and a user name on the sign-up page. Once the Email Id has been verified, set a strong password to secure your account.
- Verify the account: You need to complete your KYC, to buy SHIB token on the CoinDCX platform. All you need to do is upload the documents and your account will be set up in 15 minutes.
- Buy SHIB: After the account has been verified, you can deposit any amount of fiat currency you are comfortable with and start your crypto journey!
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Disclaimer: User Generated Content – Original Content created by a member of BITS Pilani, under the consultation of Dr. Amit Dua, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus in association with CoinDCX. The views and opinions expressed within this post belong solely to the author.
Author: Aman Bansal, Aditya Chaurariya
